With my 59th birthday coming up, I’ve been thinking about how my adult life has been structured, more or less, around decades.
My 20s were the foundation decade: got a degree, moved halfway across the country, got my first job, met Ted and got married, bought our first house (I know it was easier then, but it has more to do with us both being engineers), got another degree. It was when I took my first international trip (our honeymoon, in Jamaica), when I learned to row, when I moved halfway across the country all my myself and then the rest of the way across the country … well, also by myself, but we planned that one together and he joined me in a couple of months. Socializing was mainly through work, and then through our rowing club.
My 30s were the athlete years; though I learned to row in my 20s, my 30s were when I competed across the country, in every rowing shell from a single to an eight, and when I started thinking of myself as an athlete. That was also when I became a Six Sigma black belt, which was a major influence on the rest of my career. And it was when we started doing more adventurous travel: Europe, Australia, Antarctica. Also, it was when I became a knitter. And again, most of our friends were from rowing. Oh – and that was when I first started blogging!
My 40s were the expat and travel years. That was when we lived in the Netherlands, Taiwan, then the Netherlands again, traveled to almost every nation in Western Europe and several on other continents. My job at ASML moved me into semiconductors. We raced in the World Masters games in Australia (our second trip there, finishing with a road trip around Tasmania once the Games were over.) I’ve always written little things, poems and such, but my 40s were when I had poetry published (online) and then an actual book published (Successful Business Processes: What You Need to Know, published by AMACOM in 2014, if you haven’t been keeping track, as why should you?) Our friends were mostly from work, since that was where we met people, plus rowers in the Netherlands, and then knitters when we moved back to the US.
My fifties were the Intel years, and I think it’s fair to call them the climax of my career, such as it was. Intel challenged and stretched me more than anywhere I’d worked before, and it also gave me the chance to work with a caliber of people I hadn’t routinely encountered since I graduated from Penn. (I worked with some amazing people in previous jobs, so if you’re reading this and that’s how you know me, please assume you were one of those.) The thing about Intel was, it wasn’t shining stars here and there, more of a galaxy. Intel has (or maybe had, given all those layoffs) a lot of brilliant people, and a lot of them wanted to reach out and help others along the way. ASML was the only place I’ve worked that even came close in number of brilliant people, and they didn’t have the mentoring culture.
The other major aspect of my fifties, unlike everything I’ve written about above, wasn’t a result of my own choices. (A lot of the things I’ve written about were opportunities I didn’t create, but it was still my decision whether to accept them.) My fifties included the Covid years: the quarantine, and the years after that where I got to work at home. I’ve never liked working in an office environment, especially in cubicles where you’re always on display, so honestly it was a dream come true for me. None of my previous jobs allowed us to work at homeexcept occasionally. (Or, at Intel, for part of the day – they had to allow that, since some days my early meeting were at 7 or 7:30 and there might be evening meetings at 8 or 9 pm.)
Like everyone else, I learned to make sourdough bread during the pandemic, and decided I might as well finally learn to crochet. This decade has still included travel (notably Tahiti, Galapagos, our Norway-to-Montreal cruise) and still included rowing, though not competitively (Ted’s competing this year, though – I just don’t want to). In bad weather I mostly row indoors now, and even in good weather I’m just as likely to kayak as to scull. The second half of the decade also included making a bunch of local friends, which has been very good. (If you’ve read A Home in Percival, you pretty much know the story of how it happened. Just without magic.)
So what do I hope for, as I approach my sixties? Obviously I hope I’ll keep rowing, keep making new friends, keep knitting, keep traveling. But if my twenties were the foundation, my thirties was about competitive rowing, my forties were travel and my fifties were quarantine, I hope this will be my writing decade! Of course, A Home in Percival was published when I was 58, but that’s late enough that I can imagine looking back when I’m 85, if I’m lucky enough to be able to do that, and just generally considering the period as ‘my sixties’. Other than a seriously meandering story written when I was in college and some short fanfic (Dichroic on Archive of Our Own), A Home in Percival was really the first fiction I worked hard on, though I’ve been writing academically, professionally and avocationally my entire life. There’s definitely room for improvement. The biggest surprise, though, has been how much sheer fun it is. So that’s what I hope for: a writing decade.
I’m hoping to write fun stuff, too. The Percival stories started out as a fairy-dusted version of my own life, a great place to start. I’m not deluded that it’s great literature, but it has turned out to be the sort of quiet and kind book a lot of people need in an increasingly maddening and scary world. I want the next after that to be a romp! But we’ll see what the characters decide they want to do.
